Waoooo Smart homes… manage your house with your fingertips on tablets from your conference room. Off-course. Smart homes seems to be a collaborate infrastructure of gadgets, security modules, light and music systems & energy management. But aren’t we forgetting the most important thing – the interface between the modules and the users or apps controlling all gadgets. Can you install a lighting system in your house and connect it with your smartphone just like that or you need more. Let’s figure out the “Control and Interface” module of your dream SMART home …
When it comes to your home and your life, you don’t settle for anything but the very best. You want everything to be complete, easy and worry-free. That’s what a true home automation solution should be reliable, user friendly, theft and hacking secure. Stated requirements can be achieved by separate modules but to get them under a single code of behavior and connect with the user, machine to machine and machine to human to machine interface is required. A Smart home performance depends of the type of interfaces installed, the controls and apps for the gadgets performance and internet/communication connectivity. Let’s explore software prerequisite for a smart home design. There are few basic steps to design a home automation system. Starting with selecting your House Controller and proceed with choosing the options that you want to go with it.
Home Automation Control System
If you are looking for a built-in security system choose an family home control system that includes built-in residential UL Listed security and fire systems (UL Commercial Burglary), detecting intrusion, smoke and fire, carbon monoxide, water, and other hazards through wired and wireless sensors. For a truly secure property, integrate video surveillance, hard-wired access control, and third party wireless door locks. Additional features could be asked such as report activities to a central monitoring station, or receive a phone call, text, or email when an event occurs like children arriving home from school or a high temperature alert in a wine cellar.
If security is an individual module than you should pick up a security system that ensure energy savings in new construction and retrofit, controlling lamps, fans, shades, pumps, and third-party window coverings. The Gateway functions as an energy management coordinator, allowing for automated control of loads and remote control from a tablet or smartphone app.
Lighting, Air-conditioning, Audio and multimedia Control
Lighting Automation can enhance the enjoyment and property value of any home and business. Add security for peace of mind, and contribute to savings on energy bills. The modern lighting control systems are affordable and include dimming switches, non-dimming switches, relay switches, auxiliary switches, scene switches, mode switches, and house status switches. Home automation with lighting control gain you the ability to change your light settings by the time of day, a set schedule, by the triggering of events (including motion), via a telephone call, Touch screen, or by a computer connected to the Internet. Similar ways can be considered for fan or cooling of heat-up control in your house. Home automation will allow enjoy audio entertainment at home or business. Using Bluetooth technology to stream music from a tablet or smartphone to speakers and control the program, volume etc. Many entertainment products can be used stand-alone or integrated into a complete control system for increased functionality. Make your AV equipment more than a convenience, create an enhanced lifestyle experience.
Standalone articles
In addition to standard modules global companies like LG, Samsung etc are offering appliances like, oven; fridge etc can be controlled by your smart watch or tablet. Now you can set time by when you want your pizza ready or switch on the greaser on the way to your home. By controlling temperature and lighting based on time of day, occupancy, or outdoor temperature, remotely controlled smart appliances can reduce energy costs. Automate pool pumps, fountains, electric water heaters, and other high-draw devices, plus manage temperatures in attics, greenhouses, garages, basements, and wine cellars. From a smartphone or tablet, warm up or cool down the house after a vacation, check on temperatures, and save energy.
Energy Management
Your home control system can turn off lights, water heaters and pumps when the house is unoccupied. Also home control systems come equipped with temperature and humidity sensors that may be used for temperature based programming of events. The temperature may be used to activate programs for controlling temperatures in attics, garages, greenhouses, basements, wine cellars, coolers, etc. A comprehensive automation system provides energy saving solutions to reduce your energy usage. From a smartphone or tablet, warm up or cool down the house after a vacation, check on temperatures, and save energy. Using a smart automation system, you gain control over 100% of your energy management needs. Studies show that dimming a light by just 10% that can double the life of the bulb.
Security Systems
Most of the times safety and security is a standard aspect of the home control system. Security & Home Automation products keep you safe, manage energy consumption, and provide entertainment. An automation system is the brain of your automated home and business, coordinating security, energy, and entertainment. The security system are demanded to meet virtually all size, sophistication, and pricing requirements, providing a reliable backbone from townhouses to warehouses. Lights, temperatures, security, access control, and audio/video can be automated by time, date, day of week, as well as motion detection or door/window openings. Remote control from a smartphone or tablet is available anywhere in the world with zero subscription fees. Solutions for your home or business are available for every income level and lifestyle. Simply choose the automation, energy management, and convenience features you desire. Advanced systems may be installed in new or existing structures and controlled via your smartphone or tablet. Security system can be sub-segmented as:
Surveillance Automation helps you keep a watchful eye around your home or business, even when you’re away. View live footage of shops, entrances, nurseries, driveways and pool areas from anywhere in the world. Check up on children, pets or workers using your smartphone or tablet. Surveillance products may be used in a stand-alone installation or integrated with automation system.
Security modules includes built-in residential UL Listed security and fire systems (UL Commercial Burglary), detecting intrusion, smoke and fire, carbon monoxide, water, and other hazards through wired and wireless sensors. For a truly secure property, integrate video surveillance, hard-wired access control, and third party wireless door locks.
Another important facet of safety is Access control. When you swipe a card or key tag, you can accomplish multiple functions such as arming or disarming security and activating a door strike to open a door. Popular uses of access control include restricting access to outbuildings, gyms, theaters, cellars, and pools. Simplified wiring makes for efficient residential or small commercial use.
Apps and Interfaces
Our home control systems may be managed via a variety of Interface Options, including Touchsreens, consoles, keyfobs, keypads, switches, and software. Modern interface systems are normally a simple-to-use Touch screen that look beautiful on a wall and allows you to view the output from cameras on your Touch screen. Set yourself up for Connected Home high performance with the latest in residential technology: HDTV, media servers, Gigabit networking, VoIP, IPTV, Wi-Fi, and broadband Internet. Connected Home solutions provide the ideal backbone support network for these convenient and sophisticated technologies. Remote control of home is becoming a necessity.
Smart home apps for androids puts home and business control in the palm of your hand with zero monthly fees! Simply purchase the app from service provider and get instance access to your control system. The comprehensive app provides complete control over your entire home or business. You can even access multiple properties from a single app! Secure encrypted communication over Wi-Fi or 3G cellular data networks. App is available in supported regions for multi-lingual support in over a dozen languages. No third parties other than cellular service are required for operation. Simplify with one app on multiple devices for one price Purchase and maintain a single app for your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.
• Set lighting levels or audio from 0-100% with a sliding scale–or use quick scene buttons.
• View real time surveillance camera video–front door, nursery, pool, boat dock, etc.
• Adjusting heating and cooling and view humidity and outdoor temperatures.
• Arm/disarm the alarm. View a security log to monitor entry/exit activity.
• Select music sources and adjust volume levels in individual rooms or the entire house.
• Supports 17 different popular world languages with more being added.
• Access multiple accounts.
Interface app offers you the ability to securely access and control your home while leaving no trace behind by plugging a simple USB key drive into any computer in the world. Home Control app for Windows Media Center allows you to sit in front of your television and use the Media Center’s remote to change your home’s automation settings.
There is no widely adopted open standard for smart device communication. This prevents a lot of devices to communicate with one another. And even if they could, most devices are not designed to manage other devices. To solve this we need a device to be able to communicate with and manage all these connected devices. This device is called a hub. As a bare minimum a hub has to keep track of the state of each device and should be able to control them if possible. For example, it has to know which lights are on or off and offer a way to control the lights. For a sensor it only has to know the value. A hub with these capabilities offers home control. Most hubs on the market today offer this in various degrees of functionality and usability. Some IoT-capable devices offer this too, but only control themselves and are usually limited to location and time-based events. The majority of the IoT products out there are either lights, switches or presence detection. That’s not enough for your home to be very smart about. We need televisions, fridges, ovens and more to join the party to increase the number of devices that we can control. Most first generation IoT devices are only exposing information that is needed for controlling it. We need to be able to track all interactions with each device for our smart home to learn how interactions with devices influence other things. For example, we need to be able to track how many cups of coffee were made or how often the fridge was open. This will increase the information flow and open up a whole bunch of new possibilities. For example, the smart home can order new coffee when you’re running low. To increase adoption we will need people to trust their smart home system. It will be very tough to convince people to upgrade all their devices and upload all interactions with each of them to the cloud. This data could reveal their whole life including all bad habits. That’s why such a system should be simple and open-source so people can validate that their data generated at home stays home. Another important booster for adoption is that the software should be easy to set up and use by the average user. A lot of people are not burning their hands yet on Home Automation because they are scared of configuring it.
The interoperability and completeness of the infrastructure strongly affects the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall performance of the system. Smart home elements involve a number of common and interoperable standards for communications purposes. To integrate the various technologies and communications protocols, this kind of capacity is desirable with the aim of mutual recognition and offering continuous data transference. Inefficient and deficient integration and interaction among elements could delay the response time and also damage the global system’s throughput and operation. Since it is important for different network devices to be deployed in a non-structured mode and spread through the house, several wireless HAN applications lack the requirements to predetermined locations of individual stations. Nodes have to perform many setup and configuration steps autonomously. Those steps should incorporate the establishment of communications with near sensor nodes and find out their positions in order to start their sensing responsibilities. The information available directly affects the variability of the mode of the sensor nodes’ operation. Various sensor network applications are programmed to operate with no infrastructure support or the prospect of maintenance and repair. Consequently, in order to configure themselves, operate and collaborate with others, to adapt to failures, changes in the environment or environmental stimuli, it is a requirement of the sensor nodes to be self-managed, which means to be completely independent of human intervention.
Maintainability is a requirement that essentially reflects how durable and reliable the HAN is. The environment can change, which means depleted batteries, failing nodes and new tasks. Thus, HAN units have to monitor their own health and status in order to change operational parameters or to choose different trade-offs, such as providing lower quality when energy resource becomes scarce. In order to repair quickly and cost-effectively the various devices and communication components, the HAN must be designed for the purpose of an easy maintenance.
Smart Home successful implementation on a large scale may help address some of the major challenges in the twenty first century, such as improving efficiency gains in energy consumption or facilitating the expansion of advanced services for health care in a rapidly aging population worldwide. Short range wireless architectures have been a key consideration for a smart home enabled by wireless HAN. A key element for Smart Home HAN to be a real possibility is to integrate a mixture of wired and wireless networks through an M2M gateway. For energy management in smart homes, most of the low-power and low data protocols are adequate for this kind of function (such as MiWi, ZigBee, Wavenis, among others) with the exception of Insteon and EnOcean, which do not have enough security services. For medical and surveillance applications, Wi-Fi is better positioned. Finally, UHD multimedia requirements will still be dependent on a wired infrastructure; however, the newer Wi-Fi protocol generations are on the right path to fulfill these requirements.
Summary
All smart devices in a mart or automated home connect to the Internet. However, the way in which they interact with other smart devices and connect to your local network may vary. The vast array of communication methods used by different devices poses one of the biggest challenges in smart home tech — how do you make gadgets using different protocols communicate with one another and more important, how do you centrally manage them? Owing to their low-energy use, many smart home devices (such as LED bulbs) use ZigBee, Z-Wave or Belkin’s WEMO technology to link to each other wirelessly. However, if a smart home device doesn’t have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but only uses ZigBee or Z-Wave, then that device must first connect to a bridge or hub, which is itself connected to your router. Some devices, such as the Philips Hue lights, ship with their own hub, but if you want to control a wider range of smart home products, you’ll need a hub that supports multiple devices and protocols. So what the user is required to understand and use is a hub that supports all Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Z-Wave and Lutron. Similarly, Staples’ Connect Hubs (starting at $49.99) connects to a number of smart devices, including lamps, alarm systems, TVs and more, and centrally monitors them via a remote control or an app — no matter the protocol the smart device uses. There are a couple of caveat with smart hubs. Even if a smart hub supports ZigBee devices that does not necessarily mean it will work with all ZigBee smart products. Before purchasing a smart hub, you’ll want to ensure that it supports smart devices you have installed or want to purchase. Also complicating matters is the fact that if you purchase, say, a Dropcam or Philips Hue bulbs, you first must activate those devices using their respective apps and set up an account before you can link them to a hub such as the Wink or Staples Connect.
